No cards were banned from the Standard format. It will be an
extremely rare occurrence for cards to be banned from the Standard format.

Three changes were made to the banned list for the Expanded
format in order to maintain a fun and healthy play environment. The reasoning
for each of these changes is below:

Forest of Giant Plants: The
Forest of Giant Plants Stadium card enables many dangerous strategies with
Grass-type Pokémon in the Expanded format. These strategies can range from
locking down the opponent's options to winning the game on the first turn, and
all of them can happen before the opponent ever gets a chance to play. No
single strategy was powerful enough to ban this Stadium card, but so many of
them existing at the same time gave sufficient cause to ban it.

Archeops: The existence of Archeops's
Ancient Power Ability has a very negative effect on decks that rely on evolved
Pokémon. There are ways to combat it—Hex Maniac, Evosoda, or Wobbuffet are a few examples—but
decks that focus on evolved Pokémon are forced to use these cards just to
evolve their Pokémon. The combination of Maxie's Hidden Ball Trick with Archeops can stop Evolution before the opponent ever gets a
chance to evolve their Pokémon, which limits the number of viable strategies. Removing
a different part of the combo (Maxie's Hidden Ball Trick or Battle Compressor was also considered, but banning Archeops impacted
existing strategies the least, so that was the route that made the most sense.

Shiftry: Shiftry was banned
from the Expanded format because of an unhealthy combo with Forest of Giant
Plants. Since that card is now banned, Shiftry has been reinstated into the
Expanded format.

Tournament results will continue to be analyzed. In particular, the Expanded format will be aggressively monitored because there are so many cards and potential combinations available to players.

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